By developers for developers.

Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!

by Christophe Porteneuve

Prototype and script.aculo.us

You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!

by Christophe Porteneuve

Tired of getting swamped in the nitty-gritty of cross-browser, Web 2.0-grade JavaScript? Get back in the game with Prototype and script.aculo.us, two extremely popular JavaScript libraries, that make it a walk in the park. Be it AJAX, drag and drop, auto-completion, advanced visual effects, or many other great features, all you need is to write one or two lines of script that look so good they could almost pass for Ruby code!

Customer Reviews

I’m totally impressed that a book has been updated (and updated so well) to reflect such a recent framework change (1.6) so close to publishing time. I can’t think of any other publisher that would take the time and energy so close to publication time to keep a book current.

- Trek Glowacki

What Christophe Porteneuve’s book does is offer you is a an insider’s view… this book covered a lot of material that I wasn’t aware of.

Editor, YYZtech.ca

The readability of this volume is perhaps its best quality. I can literally sit in bed and read this book cover to cover without feeling like I need to have my laptop by my side… a great read and I highly recommend it for your bookshelf.

About this Title

Pages: 448

Published: 2007-12-01

Release: P2.0 (2009-07-06)

ISBN: 978-1-93435-601-2

Web applications are getting richer and richer, with more interaction baked in every day. But JavaScript, DOM, CSS and a full host of other Web standards are quite complex, and the result isn’t always browser compliant.

The Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries are veritable treasure troves, smoothing over all the usual nitty-gritty differences between browsers, and making most common features a breeze to implement. With this book, you can quickly wield the whole power of these extraordinary libraries.

Dive into Prototype, the library that makes JavaScript so much more powerful, and it looks a lot like Ruby code. Exploring the DOM, handling events, taming AJAX, and radically simplifying most of your scripting code: it all becomes easy—and very portable—with Prototype.

This book guides you through all the details of these features, letting you use many technologies on the server side, such as PHP, vanilla Ruby, and Ruby On Rails, in countless examples illustrating every aspect. Power users will also learn the design philosophies of the libraries, and how to contribute to them and augment them for their own needs.

Contents & Extracts

Author

Christophe Porteneuve has been doing IT R&D for over 10 years, specializing early in Web development. Involved in Ruby and Rails since 2005, and in Prototype and script.aculo.us since 2006, Christophe contributes heavily to them all, is one of the driving forces behind Prototype’s official website prototypejs.org, a prominent voice on the support mailing list, and a member of Prototype Core.